When Hopkins finally swung open its
doors to female undergraduates in 1970, no one knew quite
what to expect. Would alumni protest? Would the social life
improve? And just what would become of all those extra
urinals? (Hint: think flowerpots)

In 1972, Benetta Mansfield walked over to the Homewood athletic
center to take a phys ed course--one of the first PE classes
offered to undergraduate women. She was met at the entrance by a
gruff gym assistant who for years had been handing out a T-shirt,
shorts, and jockstrap to each male student who walked through the
door. He told her he would not provide gym clothes for women.

Mansfield, a self-described "militant feminist," wore her curly
hair long and wild and dressed in jeans bedecked with a peace
symbol on the back pocket. She loved nothing more than a good
argument. She and the assistant debated, but he refused to hand
over the gym clothes. So Mansfield took her case to
administrators, who apparently instructed the assistant that he
must accommodate the university's female students. On Mansfield's
next trip to the gym, the assistant begrudgingly handed her a
pair of shorts and a T-shirt and snidely asked if she would like
a jockstrap, too. From then on, he called her "Jockstrap
Mansfield."

Now a labor lawyer at the National Mediation Board, Mansfield
chuckles when she recalls this memory. The passage of time has
taken the edge off of it. But back then, she says, "either you
were with me or you were against me."

It is now 25 years since Mansfield and 101 other women and 589
men earned their undergraduate degrees from Johns Hopkins,
marking the culmination of the first four years of coeducation at
Homewood. In April, alumnae from those early coed years and other
alumnae and female faculty will meet on cam-pus to celebrate past
accomplishments and plan for the future of women at Hopkins.

During the quarter century since Mansfield took her stand outside
the gym, things changed a lot for women and men at Johns Hopkins.
Last May, women comprised half the graduating undergraduate Class
of 1999--a big increase since Mansfield graduated, when
graduating women made up just 15 percent of the class. In the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, there are
now 50 women in tenured or tenure-track faculty positions (about
19 percent of the tenure-track faculty). In 1972 there were just
nine.

In looking back on those early coed years at Hopkins, alumnae
recall a time that was both awkward and exhilarating, a heady era
that would forever transform Johns Hopkins, as well as the women
who were part of the transition.

"I'm sitting here running a law firm,
driving a nice car," but in the early '70s, people were
still discussing whether women should even work and how
women could be taken seriously in the academic world.--Mindy Farber '74Photo by Craig Terkowitz

Women had been knocking on Homewood's doors almost since the
university's founding. The
School of
Medicine had always admitted women (in accordance with a
stipulation of two major benefactors, both women), as had the
School of Public Health. But
Homewood was different.

The board of trustees repeatedly sent polite but terse responses
to women who sought to matriculate at Hopkins: admission denied.
Occasionally, however, the board would allow a woman to audit a
class.

In 1907, the board of trustees agreed to admit women to graduate
courses "provided there is no objection on the part of the
instructors concerned." Many women who would become well-known
and respected leaders in their fields earned graduate degrees
from Hopkins in the following decades. Rachel Carson, author of
Silent Spring, received a master's degree in
biology from Hopkins in
1932. Caroline Bedell Thomas, who discovered the prophylactic use
of sulfanilimide for rheumatic fever, studied biology and earned
her medical degree from Hopkins in 1930. But women seeking
undergraduate degrees would have to wait several decades.

In the late 1960s, several bastions of all-male higher education,
including Yale and Princeton, announced they were going coed. It
was a time of turbulence on campuses across the nation, as
students were protesting the Vietnam War, burning draft cards and
bras, demanding civil rights and student rights. Rules that
barred half of society's members from some institutions of higher
education were also subject to change.

A few Hopkins faculty and administrators were adamantly opposed
to the admission of women, and remained so even after
coeducation. G. Wilson Shaffer, then director of the
Psychological Clinic and a former longtime dean at Homewood,
believed coeducation would jeopardize the university's academic
excellence. In 1971, he told a writer for the student
News-Letter, "I know Women's Lib
is going to get me, but Hopkins should be for men only. Up to
now, I know of no male student who has had to interrupt his
studies because of pregnancy, menstruation or menopause."

But many administrators and a vast majority of the faculty
favored admitting women. "The best argument against it was that
Hopkins would have to change the bathrooms, take out the
urinals," recalls history professor Jack
Greene. Greene believed that women would boost the caliber of
class discussions.

Administrators had begun to fear that Hopkins, which in 1969 was
$530,000 in debt and suffering a decline in applications, would
continue losing applicants to other previously all-male schools
that had gone coed. They argued that admitting women would
improve Hopkins's recruitment efforts and social life, and
bolster the humanities (more on that later). In 1969, a
facultystudent-administrator committee that had been asked to
look into the issue recommended coeducation. That year, the
academic council, and finally the trustees, voted to admit women
as undergraduates.

In the fall of 1970, the 93-year-old tradition of an all-male
university ended. Ninety female undergraduates enrolled,
including 21 freshmen (all commuters). The rest were transfer
students--sophomores and juniors from Vassar, Case Western, the
University of Maryland, and other schools; they made their home
in a hastily readied McCoy Hall. The following year, Hopkins
opened the first dorms for freshman women in Adams and Baker
halls. That year the undergraduate student body grew to include
245 women and 2,017 men.

Several of the Ivies that had gone coed had received criticism
from their alumni. At Princeton, an angry group of alumni who
strongly opposed coeducation even formed its own all-male
association that supposedly even published its own newsletter.
The Hopkins administration braced for resistance from alumni,
says Ross Jones '53, longtime vice president and secretary of
the board of trustees, who is now retired. "But I never got any
complaints from our alums," says Jones.

Many of the first women undergraduates chose Hopkins for the same
reasons as their male peers: It was an academically rigorous
school with a serious, preprofessional reputation.

In fact, administrators who had expected that admitting women
would increase enrollments in the humanities and social sciences
were surprised to find that they had been "totally wrong," says
Jones. Half the incoming female freshmen in 1971 declared
themselves natural science majors.

"On the whole, the character and quality of the women who
enrolled was very much like that of the men," adds Steven Muller,
who became provost in 1971 and president soon thereafter. "Women
were as competitive as the men. You can't survive at Hopkins
without being committed to your studies."

Debbie Cebula '76 remembers how exhilarating it was to gain entry
to the previously all-male institution. "We came to Hopkins
pretty self-confident," says Cebula, who was a transfer student
from Chatham College. "We were competitive and ready to take just
about anything on. Hopkins was a good environment for that. If
you demonstrated a passion for anything, doors opened up for
you." Cebula did advanced work in German literature, held a
congressional internship, and was informally mentored by a
sociology professor. She is now special assistant to the dean of
Arts and Sciences, Herbert L. Kessler.

But Cebula and many of her classmates were not prepared for the
problems they would encounter while being vastly outnumbered by
men. "We were oblivious to what it would be like," she says.

It was, in the word of several alumnae who attended Hopkins in
the early '70s, "strange."

"You really felt like an oddball," says Janet Schwartz '74, a
natural sciences major who is now an optometrist and mother of
three in Pennsylvania. "We were one out of 12, an oddity."

"Surreal," says Brenda Bodian '74, "like being put into the play
No Exit."

"Some things were funny," recalls Mindy Farber '74, who became a
vocal feminist on campus and now runs a labor law firm in
Bethesda. Some of the buildings lacked women's restrooms, she
says, and the "women's rooms" in the dorms still contained
urinals, which the women began using as flowerpots. The athletic
center offered no physical education courses for women. It was
as though the university had hastily made the switch to being
coed without fully preparing for the change, says Farber.

And indeed, administrators appeared to intentionally adopt a
wait-and-see attitude toward the coeds and their needs. Part of
the reason was money; "We did a lot of things on a shoestring,"
said Arts and Sciences dean George Benton, in a 1971 Johns
Hopkins Magazine article. Rather than long-range planning,
said Benton, the university's attitude was, "Let's get what we
need when we need it."

"You'd go into a large lecture hall,
of 200 seats, and there would be an island of empty seats
around you. I felt like I had leprosy."--Brenda Bodain '74Photo by Craig Terkowitz

There were problems more serious than unnecessary urinals,
however.

"You'd go into a large lecture hall, of 200 seats, and there
would be an island of empty seats around you. I felt like I had
leprosy," says Bodian, who is now in the commercial real estate
business; she specializes in helping companies acquire and
renovate old buildings.

Other alumnae recall certain off-the-cuff remarks by male friends
and acquaintances: "What are you doing here? You're just going to
get married, and you're taking the place of a man."

But many of these women and male alumni also look back fondly on
their academic and social life during that period. "My five
roommates and I were always going out with Johns Hopkins men,"
says Mansfield.

Bringing women into residence life on campus, says Marty Katz
'74, "made social life happen. It was like lightning bolts." If
men were aloof, he says, it may have been because they were
having a hard time making the transition from living in a
socially cloistered environment, where they were able to focus
exclusively on their studies, to campus life that had new
distractions. Women complicated the picture. "Many of the guys
were nervous, they were scared out of their pants or repulsed by
their own craziness," says Katz, who is a freelance photographer
and writer in Baltimore.

In fact, Katz recalls that many of his male classmates were also
overly solicitous of women and grateful to have them on campus.
He remembers sitting in front of Levering Hall one day while a
female undergraduate was walking up the steps to Gilman. "From
two directions, two men started to walk briskly to open the door
for her," says Katz. As they approached the door, one of the men
actually broke into a run to beat his rival to the door.

Some of the women students, receiving conflicting signals from
their male peers, experienced a push-pull effect. In a 1970
News-Letter article, one female student described it this
way: "You feel like a cross between Gypsy Rose Lee and Typhoid
Mary."

The university's first dorms for women
opened in 1971.

"It wasn't a particularly welcoming atmosphere," says history
professor Ron Walters, who began teaching at Hopkins in 1970. "I
remember how beleaguered the first undergraduate women were."
Walters recalled one episode, when one of his TAs asked a male
undergraduate to take notes on the blackboard during a lecture.
"What do we have women for anyway?" the student responded.

Many faculty members were happy to have women in their
classrooms. But in some classes, particularly in the sciences,
says Schwartz, it seemed like certain professors wanted to
embarrass women.

In one science class, a professor would slip the occasional slide
of a nude woman in between those of carbon molecules. "That was
probably the way he had been lecturing for the past 20 years,"
Schwartz surmises. "It was not done deliberately [to antagonize
women]. But it showed insensitivity to the women in the
class."

Looking back now, however, Schwartz believes that the problems
some students had, particularly premeds like herself, stemmed not
so much from gender as from long-entrenched problems within the
Hopkins culture--especially the cut-throat nature of the premed
program. Some desperate students were said to have destroyed
classmates' lab projects so they themselves could get better
grades, says Schwartz. Many faculty members clearly made teaching
a low priority. "It was not a pleasant, cooperative
environment," says Schwartz.

Soon after coeducation began, a small group of women decided it
was time to ruffle a few Blue Jay feathers. They called a
meeting, where they shared their complaints, and formed a group
that was informally called the Hopkins Women's Liberation. The
group members were dismayed at the dearth of women on the faculty
and in top administrative posts, and by the meager sports
opportunities for women. They also were upset that Homewood did
not provide on-campus gynecological services, which in the wake
of the sexual revolution was seen as a major oversight.

The group eventually became the M. Carey Thomas Women's Center,
named after Martha Carey Thomas who had been allowed to enroll as
a post-graduate student at Hopkins in 1877 but was barred from
attending classes. After a year of study under these
restrictions, Thomas withdrew from Hopkins. She eventually became
president of Bryn Mawr College. (See sidebar.)

Women's Center members lobbied administrators to improve life for
women at Hopkins--by hastening the conversion of men's to
women's bathrooms, for instance, and helping persuade President
Muller to bring a gynecologist to the Brown Infirmary.

The students also began to call attention to the need to recruit
more female faculty and to offer women's studies courses. The
university subsequently hired graduate students to teach women's
literature and appointed historian Ann Scott as a visiting
professor to teach women's history.

"The biggest accomplishment of the Women's Center was bringing
women together as a cohesive group," says Farber. "It provided a
way to get to know each other and to draw strength and comfort in
numbers. It was also a forum for debating very hot issues of the
time." Adds Farber, "I'm sitting here running a law firm, driving
a nice car," but in the early '70s, women and men were still
discussing whether women should even work and how women could be
taken seriously in the academic world.

In 1972, art history professor Phoebe
Stanton was one of just four fully tenured female professors in
Arts and Sciences. When she began teaching at Hopkins in the
1960s, she says, the faculty club lunchroom was segregated by
gender. The men filed in through one door, the women through the
other. "At noon, the boys ate at one side," says Stanton, now an
emeritus professor. She ate on the women's side, accompanied by
the other members of her department--all male--who wanted to
include her in their lunch gathering. One day, Stanton went to
the club and learned that the rules had changed. She was allowed
to enter through the "men's door" and sit "at the boys' table."
The men did not say a word to her. "To say the men were awful,
they weren't," she says. "They were just silently
disapproving."

Women began to take their place at the table in other realms as
well. In her junior year, Farber ran for Student Council
president against Andy Savitz, a popular male student who had
already served two terms as president. Another woman, Chris
Steiner, ran for secretary. It was a Women's Center ticket, says
Farber. "To some extent it was symbolic," she says. "I was trying
to get women to be taken seriously."

To Farber, the race became centered on the male/female dynamic.
Posters were ripped down, scrawled with "libbies," "chicks," and
anti-women obscenities. Much of the student body felt a woman
could not represent them, she says.

Steiner won her election, beating out her male opponent. But
Farber lost to Savitz.

Meanwhile, other Hopkins women accomplished pioneering firsts
without formally participating in Women's Center activities.
Schwartz, for example, became the first female member of the
Debate Council and eventually president of the previously
all-male honorary society Omicron Delta Kappa. Other women stuck
to their books or focused on extracurricular interests without
making waves. The same year the M. Carey Thomas Women's Center
was founded, six women formed a cheerleading squad.

The Women's Center activities culminated in February 1974 with
"Next Step: A Festival of Women." The celebration included films
with feminist themes, panels on women and engineering, and talks
on birth control and self-defense. It featured such speakers as
Jane Fonda and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton. Festival
organizers selected the "Next Step" name to signify that it takes
many steps for women to be fully accepted into previously male
venues.

In a letter to the News-Letter her final semester, Farber
wrote: "There still has to be a group that investigates the
equity of faculty hiring... [and] insures recognition of women in
applicable academic curriculum....For the underclasswomen here, I
hope the fight's not over yet."

Pioneering cheerleaders

Through the '70s and '80s, women would continue to make strides
toward improving their status at Hopkins. The number of female
tenure-track faculty members in Arts & Sciences grew to 22 in
1982, while the percentage of undergraduate women continued to
climb.

But problems lurked beneath the surface.

In the fall of 1984, a Hopkins fraternity distributed a memo that
contained a pornographic description of rape and violence against
women. The flier sparked angry demonstrations by both women and
men who were deeply offended. It also unleashed a slurry of other
grievances, recalls professor of political
science Matthew Crenson, who was then associate dean of Arts
& Sciences. Women were concerned about the continuing
underrepresentation of women on the faculty, sexual harassment,
and the disproportionate ratio of undergraduate men to women. In
response, the deans formed an ad hoc committee headed by Crenson
to investigate the status of women at Hopkins.

The committee concluded that 15 years after commencing
coeducation, Hopkins continued to be a "male institution with an
atmosphere at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the
concerns of women." While 52 percent of the nation's college
students were women, only 33 percent of Homewood's total student
population was female, the committee reported. It also noted that
only 7 percent of Homewood's tenured and tenure-track faculty
were women, compared to more than 16 percent of the
tenured/tenure-track faculty at the nation's top universities.

The committee made several recommendations, including encouraging
departments to identify qualified female candidates when
recruiting faculty members, creating a women's studies center,
establishing a visiting feminist scholar's fund and lecture
series, and investigating the option of an on-campus childcare
center.

Not all the recommendations have produced visible changes,
acknowledges Crenson. Homewood investigated but still has no
daycare center, for instance. And women still lag behind men in
faculty numbers.

But there has been considerable progress. Women students have
gone from feeling like "lepers" to making up 50 percent of the
undergraduate pool in Arts & Sciences. A women's studies center
was begun and has flourished. Hopkins also established an office
for dealing with complaints of sexual harassment. In the sports
arena, women can today choose from among 13 varsity sports
programs; last year Hopkins women's teams competed in three NCAA
championships. Step by step, many things have changed.

Many members of the Class of '74 now have children who are
preparing to enter college themselves. To Benetta Mansfield, the
current generation of college and precollege students is "so
different." She says, "We were off the heels of the civil rights
movement, the women's movement. I'm not saying our view was
better. It was [just] a different view. Everything then had to be
relevant."

But passions fade. Now that the biggest hurdles have been jumped,
many of the causes that were once so weighty and the statements
that were so fraught with meaning are today less so. "I wore a
black armband at graduation, but I don't remember why," she
says.

Mansfield, who once chewed out a gym assistant for refusing to
give her gym clothes, now has conversations with her 16-year-old
daughter that go something like this:

Mansfield: "How do you feel when a guy says, 'Baby'?"

Daughter: "Fine."

Mansfield: "It's not fine."

Daughter: "Mom, I have enough confidence to know it's not
a sexist remark!"

Mindy Farber's daughter, Emilie, is 15 and determined she'll run
for governor of Maryland. Says Farber, "She is born of this
generation and very naturally feels she can do anything."